by Steve LeBel
“It doesn’t sound like a good idea to go back and get new stuff, Bernie,” said Lenny. “Shemal may see it as more waste. Are you really sure the prefabs are defective?”
“Well, not really. I talked to Saul in the Supply Division, and he’s never heard of problems like I’m having. He checked around and said no one else has either.”
“Then I agree with Lenny, Bernie. It might be better to work with what you have,” Suzie concluded.
“I guess you’re right,” said Bernie in a dejected manner.
* * *
Bernie spent the rest of the day and most of the next recreating his plant life. By quitting time, he was satisfied everything was as before. In fact, better. The volcanic ash and the decaying layer of former plant life turned out to be a good fertilizer for his new plants. They grew faster and stronger than the first batch.
But Bernie left with the uneasy feeling there were more problems on the way.
More Sabotage!
Bernie stormed into the cafeteria, his shimmer flashing angry colors in every direction, leaving a battlefield of interrupted conversations in his wake. For added punctuation, his chaos cloud pushed chairs and overturned napkin holders on the tables as he passed by, sparking more than a few exclamations and protests. Bernie didn’t notice any of it.
“I can’t believe it,” Bernie said.
“Please try to calm down, Bernie. Everyone’s looking at you. Your cloud is whipping,” Suzie said as she tried to calm her friend.
“What’s going on, Bernie?” Lenny asked as he arrived with his lunch tray.
“My world, that’s what! It’s messed up again.”
“What happened?” Lenny glanced nervously at his fork as something bent it into a circle and caused it to roll off his tray.
“Everything was perfect last night when I left. Then, this morning, my beautiful blue ocean is all red!” Bernie struggled to calm his cloud.
“How did it happen?” Lenny asked.
“I don’t know. It happened beyond the Past Barrier so I can’t find out a thing. I think I’ve got a lemon world or something,” Bernie said. “It looks like a spontaneous generation of red plankton, and it spread throughout the oceans. Now I have to get rid of it all.”
“How did it spread so far overnight? Didn’t you suspend your universe when you left?” Lenny asked.
“Yes, of course, but overnight it moved ahead by a million revolutions, which cuts into my—”
“Wait a second, Bernie,” Lenny interrupted. “Are you sure you suspended it when you left?”
“Yes, because I had the plants just about right, and didn’t want them evolving anymore.”
Lenny squinted as he forced his thoughts to the surface, “I think someone is messing with you.”
“What do you mean?” Suzie asked.
“If you suspended time when you left, the only way your universe can move forward a million years is if someone went in after you and changed it. The universe can’t do it by itself. Only a god can do it,” Lenny said.
“Billy!” cried both Bernie and Suzie at the same time.
The Backdoor
There had to be a way to keep an eye on his universe and protect it from Billy. Then he remembered the Off World Technology group meeting just a year ago. It would be perfect. Bernie checked both the big manuals and found nothing to prohibit it. So he was going to do it.
He understood the concept very well, and at lunch, Lenny agreed it was a good idea. Suzie had pursed her lips, but said nothing, which Bernie took to be permission.
* * *
“What’s a backdoor?” Bernie had asked.
Skeet, who’d waited two weeks for his turn to present his latest discovery to the OWT group, was eager to tell everything he knew. “It’s a great way to get into your universe from a distant location.”
“What good is that?”
“Well, if you didn’t have a chance to finish something on one of your universe projects at school, a backdoor lets you get into it later from home.”
“Are you sure that’s okay?” Bernie thought it was beginning to sound like cheating.
“Well, you don’t tell anyone you’re doing it,” said Skeet. “That’s the whole idea behind a backdoor. They’re supposed to be secret.”
“How does it work?” asked Lenny.
“You create a hole in your universe just like we do when we attach our viewing windows. This time, you hide the hole in a corner where no one would look, and instead of attaching a viewing window to it, you attach something of yours, like an old shoe—anything that’s received a good dose of vibes from your shimmer. That lets you find it again later. Then, when you’re home, you search among the voids until you find the one with your shoe. When you find it, remove your shoe and put a new viewing window in its place. Use some putty to hide your second window. You don’t want anyone finding it. And that’s it. You now have a secret door you can use to get into your universe whenever you want.”
Bernie couldn’t think of any reason he would ever need such a thing. But that was then.
* * *
Bernie entered his universe, moving with the speed of thought to its farthest corner where he punched a small hole into the world of the gods. He removed his ring and positioned it in the opening between the two universes. With some help from the putty, he attached his ring halfway between the two worlds. Then, to make sure it remained completely hidden, Bernie added more putty. He didn’t want Shemal to find it and tell him it was against the rules.
With his new backdoor, Bernie would be able to enter his universe at any time. If someone was trying to sabotage his world, he would catch them.
* * *
Bernie rushed home after work, eager to complete his doorway. In the quiet of his room, he cleared his mind as he reached out into the infinite number of dimensions surrounding his own. Somehow, in the darkness, he sensed the presence of his ring. It was far away, but it was there. Carefully, he reached out until he was able to grasp the ring. Gently, so as not to dislodge it from the universe, Bernie pulled the ring closer and closer. Next, he removed the ring and replaced it with a viewing window from his collection. It took extra time to seal the window because he had no putty at home.
Finally, it was ready. He eagerly entered the universe, finding it just as he’d left it an hour earlier. He saw no changes to his sun or planet. He was so pleased with the success of his backdoor, he almost didn’t notice a foreign shimmer on the planet’s surface.
As Bernie approached the shimmer, he saw an infection spreading through his plant life. Some sort of fungi was stealing energy from his plants, sucking their life forces, and leaving behind moldy coatings of rust and rotted tissue. He watched in horror as the blight advanced rapidly across the forest, leaving moldering stumps where once great trees had stood. He realized he was observing it in accelerated time. Someone had pushed their time lever forward. Hundreds of years were flying past as Bernie watched. The wilting stain devoured everything, leaving behind rotting memories of his once-beautiful plants. Then time slowed down as someone pulled their time lever to a complete stop.
Before Bernie could overcome his shock at the decimation of his plants, the shimmer disappeared. Billy! It had to be Billy, he thought. If he had stayed a little longer, would he have confronted him? What would he have said? It didn’t matter now. The real question now was what did he do and could it be fixed?
Realizing the Past Barrier was clear all the way back to the time when he first entered the universe, even though hundreds of years had passed on the planet, Bernie pulled his time lever back and watched his plants miraculously recover from the blight that had consumed them. Bernie moved back until he saw the shimmering figure as it introduced the disease. As the figure began moving forward in time, Bernie stayed where he was. Here, in this time, only a handful of plants had been infected so far. He approached the doomed plants, carefully visualizing both plants and the disease destroying them. He blinked them out of existence. In tha
t instant, the sick plants and the deadly disease they bore were gone. There would be no patient zero here today.
When Bernie blinked the diseased fungi out of existence, he created something teachers hate being asked to explain: a time paradox. He changed the future. Yet the future experienced by the shimmering figure was also real; it just wasn’t part of the future Bernie stood in now. Bernie had cut the ribbon that led to that future when he blinked the fungi. Back in the god’s world, the shimmering figure may think he has done something to damage Bernie’s universe, but if he comes back, he will not find a world with its forests in ruin. That world might exist somewhere, but Bernie’s action made it inaccessible to any god. Where it went or what happened to it is one of the Great Mysteries. No one really knows.
Bernie was just glad the world of ruined forests was no longer in his universe.
Lenny’s Charms
“Where’s Suzie?” Bernie asked as he set his tray on the table.
“She hasn’t arrived yet,” said Lenny, “but that’s okay because I have some guy stuff to show you, and I’m not sure she would appreciate it.”
“Oh?”
“See that girl over there, the one with the red dress walking down the aisle? Watch this.” Lenny opened his hand to reveal a piece of dark wood. He closed his hand again so only a small section of it extended beyond his thumb and index finger. He surreptitiously pointed his hand in the girl’s direction. The young goddess came to a dead stop and began looking around as if searching for someone. Unable to find whatever it was she sought, she shook her head and resumed her walk.
Lenny grinned. “Now see that girl over there? The one carrying her tray back to the empty shelves?”
As soon as Lenny moved his hand in her direction, she too stopped and began scanning the cafeteria. Lenny put his head down before she could catch him looking at her.
“What is that thing?” Bernie asked.
“The guy I got it from called it a ‘tweaker stick’. The people who invented it use it to send signals to each other across long distances, like a wireless telegraph. It works on us too. About 80% of females and 40% of males so far are sensitive to it,” he said as he made two more slash marks in his notebook under the female column.
“What good is it?”
“Well, not much by itself,” Lenny admitted, “but if you combine it with other things, I think it’ll be very useful. I’m researching several combinations right now.”
Bernie couldn’t help but ask, “All right. Tell me.”
“Think of it as a one-two punch. The first one gets a girl’s attention, and the second one gives them a reason to keep looking.”
“What does the second charm do exactly?” Bernie asked.
“They’re all different. Today is my first day with this one,” Lenny said pointing to a golden stud in his left earlobe. “It’s supposed to make me look sexy. So far, it doesn’t seem to do much. You find that sometimes. A charm works great for someone else, but doesn’t do anything for you, and vice versa.”
“How long have you been collecting charms?”
“Gosh, ever since I was a kid. I’ve got hundreds of pages of notes on them too. If you’re going to make scientific progress, you’ve got to do a lot of testing, you know.”
“Have you ever found anything that works?”
“Well, nothing’s perfect, Bernie,” Lenny said a little defensively. “But I’ve found a few combinations that show a lot of promise. If you’re interested, I know a couple that are practically guaranteed to work for you. Oh, oh—”
Lenny looked up. “Hi there, Suzie. Bernie and I’ve been waiting for you,” he said as he closed his notebook and tucked it away in his pocket.
Shemal Startles Bernie
Although Bernie spent his days working on his universe, he didn’t get much accomplished. He was too tired from staying up most of the night, guarding it from unwanted intruders. Despite his vigilance, he hadn’t seen the shimmering figure again. During the day, when he looked at Billy’s cubicle, Billy seemed busy on his own tasks, apparently oblivious to Bernie or his suspicions.
Shemal made a surprise inspection three days after the rotting fungus incident. Bernie was deep in thought and did not hear him approach. When Shemal touched him on the shoulder, Bernie jumped. His shimmer lit up both his cubicle and the ceiling above him.
“Hey, shimmer down, kid. It’s just me,” Shemal said.
“Yes, sir,” said Bernie as he fought to get his shimmer under control. That wasn’t what worried him. His shimmer, after all, was just light. His chaos cloud, on the other hand, could be much more dangerous. He found it busy rattling his wastebasket and lining up paperclips for suicide jumps off the corner of his desk.
“Do you know how to work your dampener?” Shemal reached over to the cosmic dampener installed in Bernie’s cubicle. “You have a chaotic bent, right?” he asked as he cranked the dial up from two to eight, thus saving the lives of four paper clips who had not yet made the leap.
“No, sir. I didn’t find anything about it in the manuals, and we didn’t have anything like them in school.”
“I had them invented especially for Final Assembly. I wanted to eliminate any quality problems that might be coming from my own people. They work really well. People like you, with a strong chaotic bent, can move things out of alignment when you get upset. This baby tones down that effect,” he said as he affectionately patted the dampener. “It works on order clouds, too. Don’t let them kid you, they can cause just as many problems when they get out of control as you chaos’ers can. I had one of them cause every planet and moon in her system to come into perfect alignment. We almost had a cosmic episode right there.” Shemal chuckled at the memory.
“They teach us to control our clouds, but sometimes—”
Shemal interrupted, “Try it at eight for a couple of days, but don’t be afraid to turn it up. It should keep your cloud under control.
“Now, let’s see what you’ve been up to.” Shemal peered into Bernie’s universe, and his eyes took on a far-away look. His only sounds were an occasional, “Tsk, tsk.” and a couple of “What’s this?” and one “Oh, my,” along with several headshakes. After five minutes, his eyes came back, and he said, “I can see you’re getting a bit further, Bernie, but I don’t see anything here that impresses me. Tell me, why did you make all those volcanoes and then plug them up?”
He and Suzie had discussed how to respond to these questions. They decided it would not be wise to blame Shemal’s nephew for Bernie’s problems. Suzie said Shemal’s reviews of Billy were excellent, and she was sure Shemal wouldn’t believe anything bad about him.
“Two reasons, sir. I wanted to make the landscape more rugged looking, and I wanted a good layer of volcanic ash spread around the planet to accelerate plant growth.”
Shemal grunted an acceptance of Bernie’s answer. “Why are some of the sand and rocks stained red?”
“There were red plankton in my ocean. I…I got rid of them, but…but the coastal areas were badly stained,” Bernie stammered.
“Sounds like sloppy work, Bernie. And why don’t I see any animal life forms?”
“My higher life forms have very complex elements and interdependencies, so I’m delaying introduction of any animal life until I have everything worked out.”
“Work harder, kid,” Shemal said as he headed back to his office.
The Putty
Shemal’s inspection had not gone well. Bernie spent the rest of the day thinking about the price of failure. He had no doubt of Shemal’s disappointment with his performance, and he knew Shemal would fire him if he thought Bernie couldn’t do the job. It was hard enough to create a good universe, but it was impossible when another god was undermining your efforts. How could he fight a god with powers as great as his own? Especially a god who didn’t play by the rules? Even though he was trying his hardest, he could feel his grip on his life as a builder slipping away.
Maybe that was why Bernie, never kno
wn for neatness even in the best of times, was more careless than usual. By the end of the day, he was so distraught he forgot to clean up his workspace before heading zombie-like toward the door. That was also why he forgot the jar of putty on the planet’s surface.
* * *
Bernie’s scarred and broken world hung like a big blue marble in the black emptiness of the void. The only life forms were the plants on the land and in the water.
The putty didn’t have thoughts or feelings as we know them. It was just a translucent gob of goo. But it was aware of the warm sun, and the putty liked the way it felt when the sun shined on it. In fact, the putty liked the sun very much, and wanted to be closer—to reach out and touch the warm bright thing in the sky.
Slowly, small tendrils grew out of the jar and arched upward. You could almost see it stretching, as if waking up from a long sleep. Each tendril shimmered in a kaleidoscope of colors, experimenting until it seemed more and more of the tendrils agreed on green. It liked green. You couldn’t call it a plant at this point, because it hadn’t really decided what it wanted to be. Right then, it wanted only to be with the sun.
As the sun went lower and lower in the sky, its warmth began to fade. The tendrils reached out farther, searching for the light and the warmth, but it didn’t help. The sun was leaving.
As it watched the sun set in the west, the putty didn’t like feeling alone. It wanted the bright warm thing to stay. It reached out all of its tendrils and stretched farther, as if beseeching the sun not to go.
And as it watched the sun slip down beyond the edge of the world, the putty reached out so far that the jar, its home, fell over. As the putty oozed from the jar, it yearned for its warm friend.
Ever so slowly, it found a way to move. It moved as a snail would move if it had a forest of arms on its back, each arm reaching toward the sun as its body slithered in the same direction.
